Privileged Planet: Check Your Local PBS Listings

As noted in comments, creationists are hoping to have PBS play The Privileged Planet after the SI showing. PT has done some investigating and can report the following, straight from the PBS administration: PBS affiliates have been offered the opportunity to broadcast Privileged Planet starting 1 June 2005 and lasting for three years.

Individual PBS affiliate stations have great discretion in setting programming schedules and it is to them that you should direct your inquiries on this matter. You may find your local PBS station’s address at PBS.org.

Has anyone Fisked the claims of the film, or the book? I was interested in the claim that total eclipses occur only on Earth in our solar system – partly because it assumes every eclipse is total and that the Moon is perfectly positioned to cover all of the Sun every time, which is not so; and partly because I seem to recall a chart in a newspaper in the past couple of years tracing the route of an eclipse on another planet in our solar system, which I had assumed at the time was total by the way the diagram showed the shadow on the planet’s surface (hey, you don’t need a big moon to blot out the Sun once you’re past Mars, right?)

If your local PBS station shows the thing, shouldn’t there be a balancing out with five or six hours of real science?

Just a note: The Privileged Planet doesn’t claim total solar eclipses only occur on earth. It claims that nowhere else in the solar system are there total solar eclipses where the very outer layer of the sun’s atmosphere is still visible.

If you guys are really interested in pointing out problems with the book/film, you might want to try reading the book or watching the film for yourselves. If I remember correctly the documentary mentions that Guillermo Gonzalez’s calculations regarding these eclipses have been published in a peer reviewed journal, and if anyone really cares the reference can probably be found without too much difficulty. It’s probably not a terribly difficult thing to calculate, if you know what you’re doing.

Just a note: The Privileged Planet doesn’t claim total solar eclipses only occur on earth. It claims that nowhere else in the solar system are there total solar eclipses where the very outer layer of the sun’s atmosphere is still visible.